3. Your website has no clear goal

Would a visitor coming to your website for the first time know exactly what you wanted her to do when she got there? Would she see a clear, concise message right away? Would there be a clear call to action? Or maybe it would be a bit more complicated, maybe a whole lot of text, maybe a bit muddled.

When a user first arrives at a site, there should be clear headlines, concise body copy, and a clear call to action.

The homepage for your website is like an advertisement, and should have the same basic pieces, headline, body copy, call to action. All of your navigation should be secondary to this.

Text on the page is good, Google likes it. Descriptive body text is best. Text that talks about your website and the products and services that you offer is better. If you’re an organization selling memberships, text that talks about your value proposition to your members is best.

Don’t waste pixels on graphics that don’t get your message across and don’t waste your breath on text that doesn’t drive your user toward a goal.

4. Google doesn’t even know you exist

Google is smart, but it can’t read minds – yet.

You need to write your content in a way that you clearly communicate to Google what is important, and what is not.

You can do this through the subtle language of semantic markup, the far more subtle language of link balancing, or the comparatively blunt tool of robots.txt, but the one thing that is for certain is that you cannot do it with words that are in text, or content that is loaded in from an external source, be that flash or JavaScript.

Google, and similar services (Bing, Yahoo, etc.) are increasingly the sources that people use to get their news and information. If Google doesn’t know about your site, then it can’t send traffic to your site. If Google isn’t sending traffic to your site, then you’ve got some pretty big problems.

FREE Bonus Tip:

Having a website that is tough to update is like having plants that are hard to water. Put another way, making it difficult on yourself is the surest way to be confident that you won’t do it.

Gone are the days when you’re forced to rely on a cumbersome process to update your website’s content. These days, many content management systems deliver powerful features that busy, non-technical people can utilize without wasting time or money.

If you don’t have a way to quickly, easily, and safely update the content to your website, then chances are that you don’t do it. If you don’t update your content, you’re likely falling being competitors that are updating their website on a regular basis and keeping it fresh.